On Angels and Innocence
Priscilla Jolly


For My Grandfather.

“There were waters to cross, they were wild and tossing,
If you fell, there were dragons and river monsters.” [i]
                                                                                                                Du Fu

Waters, wild and wary, hiding monsters—malicious and malignant—lurking in the dark, waiting for you to make the smallest of missteps. The beginnings of a childhood nightmare, the beginnings of the fear of strange and unknown. When fear coils so tight that it immobilizes the mind and plants seeds of suspicion everywhere, the mind looks for something to hold on to, in order to keep the fear at bay. For children who grew up in Catholic households like mine, the idea of a guardian angel served this purpose. When I think of guardian angels, what comes to mind is a picture, a quintessential picture in a Catholic childhood. A thin suspension bridge stretched over the water. Water, foaming and frothing against the slick, slippery rocks. If you fell, the water would have borne you away from this world. On one side of the bridge, a young boy and a girl stood on the bridge, trying to cross the bridge. The bridge bore several missing links, making it practically impossible for the children to cross. The boy has draped his arm around the girl. It was the last element of the picture that made it so crucial to a Catholic childhood—an angel hovering above the children, making the danger and peril vanish in radiant, resplendent glory.

The angel depicted in flowing white robes and a halo, made the picture safe; the presence of the angel made the picture seem like a state of affairs that children could aspire for. Despite their crazed, chaotic surroundings, the children in the picture appeared restful with a cool calmness suffused with an assurance of peace. I wanted what those children seemed to possess; I wanted the same assurance as them. Since their assurance came from the angel in the picture, I desired to befriend an angel. I wasn’t the only one who was struck by the idea. The makers of a Christian children’s magazine which I read published a comic strip about two teenagers who had an angel named Seraphin as their best friend. Whenever they were in a quandary, they would kneel down to pray and Seraphin would appear. Doing what Seraphin asked solved all their problems and it seemed to make them happy.

During this time, I came across a memoir named “Under Angel Wings”, which my grandfather had bought home after one of his trips. It was the memoir of a little girl, who would later become a nun (Sister Maria Antonia), speaking about her experiences with her guardian angel. The girl, Cecy Cony, was able to see and converse with her guardian angel; the memoir provided a detailed account of how Cony was able to lead a virtuous childhood, thanks to her angel. The memoir made things seem less abstract; after all, it was written by a girl who was more or less my age, around thirteen or fourteen. The book also gave strength to the idea of having an invisible, special friend who possesses supernatural powers, a celestial being assigned to be your faithful shadow and protector.

For someone who was busy constructing imaginary friends and magic circles in the grass, the idea of a guardian angel held an appealing allure. Cecy Cony wrote about situations in which the angel saved her, acted as her conscience and finally as her friend. She was the only one who could see the angel and converse with it. The memoir and my grandfather’s response to it indicated that Cecy Cony was an exceptional child. It was, in other words, every child’s dream–to be considered special.

I wanted a special friend, who would hover over me like in the picture, and who would warn me when I was about to do something reckless. I was one of those children who had imaginary conversations running in my head, sometimes the conversations spilling into actuality. In my imaginings, in those days, angels were ethereal beings whose skin glowed. They had long, flowing, blonde hair, wore billowing white robes with chunky gold motifs on them. They simply glided instead of walking. I imagined angels as fantastical creatures; I could never imagine them the way my grandfather did.

When I was reading Cecy Cony’s memoir, my grandfather was also trying to read it. It was hard for him since he didn’t read much in English. Nevertheless, he persisted because the subject was dear to him. Eventually, he got my uncle to translate the book into Malayalam in small installments. After he read the book, my grandfather, clearly feeling inspirational, decided to put something from the book in to practice. Cecy Cony had written that before going to bed, she said goodnight to her angel. As he tucked his swollen legs under layers of blankets, my grandfather would say in a low voice “Goodnight Jesus, Mary and Holy Spirit. Goodnight my guardian angel.” A new nightly ritual. The action was strange because no one ever said goodnight at home, particularly not my grandfather. The only folks who said goodnight were the people in the late night Hollywood movies that I used to watch after everyone else in the house had gone to bed. Also, the way I understood it, ‘goodnight’ was usually directed at someone who was physically present in the same space as you. My grandfather, unfazed by the spatial and temporal constraints, continued the habit till he died.

Looking back, I don’t find the ritual as ridiculous as I thought it to be was when I was a teenager. Perhaps, my grandfather was able to find what I’d dreamt about as child: the assurance of the children in the picture. The certainty with which he believed was the same as the assurance of calmness experienced by the children on the bridge.  For my grandfather, his nightly greeting was an utterance he cast into the void; rather, it was a message of affection intended for recipients whose existence was unwaveringly real for him. That which I considered improbable was probable and possibly real for him.

The alternate reality that existed for my grandfather never existed for me, not with the same unwavering flame of fervor. My conception of my grandfather’s reality was shaky at its best. For all his shortcomings, I admire my grandfather for his innocence of faith. St. Paul, one of his epistles, provides the definition of faith as “the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not.”  “The evidence of things that appear not” could either be a foolish dogged belief or something that requires great reserves of strength. My grandfather’s habit did not die out; he allowed the habit to grow strong. The strength that my grandfather allowed his nightly habit to gather, perhaps came from his expectations of things to be hoped for. Things that only he could see, similar to Cecy Cony’s angel. He continued saying goodnight to angels. For him to be able to do so, he must have visualized his hopes, or perhaps he must have found proof that made his beliefs valid. Angels were always real for him.

The unquestioning trust that my grandfather put in his reality, the existence of angels, is something that I would like to see as the innocence of faith. The innocence that drove him to wait for “the substance of things to be hoped for.” It must have taught him willingness to wait.

And the art of waiting is difficult to master–to wait without frenzied fretting or weeping. Is it possible at all to wait unwaveringly, withstanding shards of doubt, and evidence to the contrary? Is that what my grandfather was doing? Was he assaulted by doubt in his long wait and endless nights of whispered greetings? T. S. Eliot writes about waiting in “Four Quarters.”

“But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.”[iii]

How much should one love to wait unquestioningly? I can only imagine that my grandfather must have loved enough so that he was able to repeat the same ritual, night after night. I’ll never know that which he waited for; the best I can hope for is that his wait was like the one Eliot wrote about.

While innocence seems like an ideal state of existence meant to be preserved, I believe Fitzgerald was being truthful when he wrote “I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” [iv] Innocence is about familiar pleasures, tame desires and comfortable contours. Familiar edges. The awareness of lines that delineate existence, lines that must never be crossed. Some time ago, angels stood at the edge of my existence. I imagined them in the same way that the makeup artist had dressed me for a biblical tableau that was to be staged for the school day celebrations. My curly hair was painted yellow, cardboard wings embellished with sequins were attached to my dress while I tried to sip lemonade, trying my best to not dislodge the color that had just been applied to my lips.

So I imagined angels in my likeness or rather the likeness that the makeup artist had envisioned for me. At some point in time, I stopped imagining angels altogether. Losing one’s innocence is also losing the edges of one’s world or the edges that one has imagined for oneself. It is a dissolution of the ideas about the self, at times notions and facades that have been built painstakingly over the years—all of it disappearing in wispy willows of smoke. Perhaps when Fitzgerald wrote about the pleasure of losing one’s innocence, he was also speaking about the pleasure of rediscovering the world, the moment when you wake and discover that the world has remained the same, but your perception of the world has not.

Like any other rite of passage, even the dissolution of edges leaves its mark, cementing the moment when your spirit stepped beyond the lines that previously defined your existence.

Since desire is nothing but transgression of lines, dissolution of edges entails desire of a different sort. It could be the desire to conquer more edges, to go on vanquishing edges to reach the point that Theodore Roethke wrote about. “The edge is all I have.”[v] Or it could be a desire to go back to an earlier state of existence. If not anything else, the art of dissolution of lines is a way to discover oneself. Borges wrote,

“I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.”[vi]

If there’s something that I desire from life, it is captured in Borges’ lines. To be surprised by the limits of one’s self and its endurance. I don’t know where my grandfather’s edges lay. Neither am I aware of his attempts to dissolve his edges. I can only assume that he held on to a few edges so that he could whisper goodnight to his guardian angel. Now, angels feature in my thought as recollections of that old school tableau and when I read Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?..."









[i] Du Fu “Seeing Li Bai in A Dream I”  300 Tang Poems

[ii] Hebrews 11:1, The New Testament

[iii] East Coker, “The Four Quartets” T.S. Eliot

[iv] This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

[v] “In a Dark Time” Theodore Roethke

[vi] “Two English Poems” Jorge Luis Borges

[vii] Duino Elegies, The First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke

About the Author:
Priscilla Jolly is a firm believer in the power of books, stories and tea. She has worked as an English-language teacher for the last two years. She is working as a French teacher at the moment. She loves reading and teaching young children. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Pine+Basil, eFiction India,The Missing Slate, The Hamilton Stone Review and Tinge Magazine. She lives and works in Hyderabad, India. 

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